1. Field
The present invention generally relates to wireless telecommunications, and more specifically, relates to a system and method for enabling automatic over the air downloading of driver for a peripheral device communicating with a wireless device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Technology advancement has made mobile telephones or wireless communications devices cheap and affordable to almost everyone. As the wireless telephones are manufactured with greater processing ability and storage, they also become more versatile. Now different peripheral accessories can be connected to a wireless telephone, and thus, new functionalities can be provided through the wireless telephone. Some accessories simply use the communication ability of the wireless telephone to communicate data across the phone network. In such instance, the wireless telephone is simply used as a modem.
Other computer devices provide some functionality to the wireless telephone. For example, a user may be able to plug in an external camera, from which photographic images can be downloaded into the wireless telephone and transmitted to a destination party. Alternatively, a user may want to plug in an external memory storage device into a wireless telephone equipped with a camera to save photographs taken by the camera.
One problem with a wireless telephone is that they possess a limited memory capacity and can not save many photographs that have significant storage requirements. Therefore, the user may temporarily plug the external memory storage device into the wireless telephone and transfer the photographic images from the wireless telephone into the external memory storage device.
Currently, most of these external devices are developed by either wireless telephone manufacturers or a party authorized by the manufacturers and the drivers for these external devices are pre-loaded in the wireless devices. Because of limited storage capacity of these wireless devices, it becomes difficult to load a great number of drivers to support external peripheral devices manufactured by different manufacturers. This limits the selection of external peripheral devices available to users of wireless/mobile devices. In addition, more varieties of external peripheral devices will likely become available after the wireless device has been manufactured. Some means for providing drivers and applications software for those additional external peripheral devices will be required. Packaging a driver and applications software with the external peripheral device, as is generally done for personal computers, is not generally desirable or even possible for wireless devices.